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New release: PowerCLI 6.3 R1–Download it today!

It is my pleasure to inform you that vSphere PowerCLI 6.3 Release 1 has now been released and as usual we have some great features to ensure you are able to automate even more features and in this release, faster than ever! As always we take feature requests directly from customers, through feedback at conferences, by looking at the communities and multiple other ways. please do keep giving us your feedback to enable us to keep making the product easier and making automation tasks less painful.

PowerCLI 6.3 R1 introduces the following new features and improvements:

Get-VM is now faster than ever!

The Get-VM Cmdlet has been optimized and refactored to ensure maximum speed when returning larger numbers of virtual machine information. This was a request which we heard time and time again, when you start working in larger environments with thousands of VMs the most used cmdlet is Get-VM so making this faster means this will increase the speed of reporting and automation for all scripts using Get-VM. Stay tuned for a future post where we will be showing some figures from our test environment but believe me, its fast!

New-ContentLibrary access

New in this release we have introduced a new cmdlet for working with Content Library items, the Get-ContentLibraryItem cmdlet will list all content library items from all content libraries available to the connection. This will give you details and set you up for deploying in our next new feature….

The New-VM Cmdlet has been updated to allow for the deployment of items located in a Content Library. Use the new –ContentLibrary parameter with a content library item to deploy these from local and subscribed library items, a quick sample of this can be seen below:

Another great feature which has been added has again come from our community and users who have told us what is hard about our current version, the Get-Esxcli cmdlet has now been updated with a –V2 parameter which supports specifying method arguments by name.

The original Get-ESXCLI cmdlet (without -v2) passes arguments by position and can cause scripts to not work when working with multiple ESXi versions or using scripts written against specific ESXi versions.

For the more advanced users out there, those who constantly use the Get-View Cmdlet you will be pleased to know that a small but handy change has been made to the cmldet to enable it to auto-complete all available view objects in the Get-View –ViewType parameter, this will ease in the use of this cmdlet and enable even faster creation of scripts using this cmdlet.

Updated Support

As well as the great enhancements to the product listed above we have also updated the product to make sure it has now been fully tested and works with Windows 10 and PowerShell v5, this enables the latest versions and features of PowerShell to be used with PowerCLI.

PowerCLI has also been updated to now support vCloud Director 8.0 and vRealize Operations Manager 6.2 ensuring you can also work with the latest VMware products.

About Alan Renouf

Alan Renouf is a Product Line Manager at VMware focusing on API's, SDK's and CLI's, He is responsible for providing the architects and operators of private and public cloud infrastructure with the toolkits/frameworks and command-line interfaces they require to build a fully automated software-defined datacenter.
Alan is a frequent blogger at http://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI a book author and has a personal blog at http://virtu-al.net.
You can follow Alan on twitter as @alanrenouf.

Can line 306 of the Initialize-PowerCLIEnvironment.ps1 be removed in future releases? After the script finishes, it changes the working directory to C:\. This prevents the “VMware vSphere PowerCLI” shortcut from starting in the preferred working directory as set in the “Start in:” field.

VMware releases the worst code now. The management there is running vmware into the ground and if vmware continues to release worthless non-functioning software like this piece of junk software PowerCli 6.3 that doesn’t even have connect-vsiserver in it. How the heck can I use it if it doesn’t even contain the module to connect to vcenter.

Every release in the past 2 years has been complete crap with horrible code by India with bugs embedded on purpose. Stop ruining this company hiring worthless coders from India and bring back the stable quality vmware code we bought into!

I hate Hyper-V but will continue to watch it and switch sooner then later because the lack of vmware to provide functional software is ridiculous. I have to throw away a decade of experience because VMware is turning into a steaming pile that nobody is going to trust anymore.

Hi,
Why does ContentLibraryItem not worh together with OSCustomizationSpec??
Wen have 3 vCenters and want to use one Base image in all 3 to deploy new Servers. We worked with templates and OSCustomizationSpec and tried to switch to ContentLibrary but the two functions do not work together!

since I updated from PowerCLI 6.0.0 to 6.3.0 there is a problem with the Get-VM command.
I think it is a permission problem, because the admin-User gets a list of all VMs when I write “get-vm” in Powershell.

But the other users (Role is Administrator defined in a folder) get no VMs as response for get-vm.
With PowerCLI 6.0.0 it worked without problems.

Which permission has to be set in vSphere to get “GET-VM” working again?

Maybe related, maybe not, but I noticed that when I moved to powerCLI 6.3 I had to grant permissions at the vCenter level for the service account that was logging in using connect-viserver. Looks like maybe there was a change in connect-viserver that wants permissions at the vCenter object instead of only at the datacenter or cluster level.